BookFiona Subotsky.
Summary: Exploring how medicine and psychiatry are portrayed in gothic literature, this engaging book illustrates how Stoker's famous work was influenced by nineteenth-century attitudes to disease and medicine and reveals many previously unknown links. Extracts from many sensational stories of the time are presented, and the role of doctors and their appearance and contribution to gothic fiction is investigated. The book covers topics such as asylums, their purpose, practice and patients, deadly diseases echoing the symptoms of vampirism, and the otherworldly allure of the undead. Dracula for Doctors is an entertaining and informative examination of how Victorian medical knowledge and culture informed Stoker's gothic masterpiece. This book suggests that Stoker, who had many medical connections, was able to link lurid stories of operations and asylums with fictional horror and suspense. Fans of gothic literature, as well as those of medical history and the supernatural, will find this an enjoyable read.
Contents:
Body and mind
Medico-gothic
Stoker medical circles
Asylum doctors
The gothic asylum
Renfield, the pet lunatic
The other patients
Diagnosing Dracula
Dread, disease and the asylum
Occult blood
Holes in the skull
Dead, alive or undead
Therapeutic armamentarium
Compelling eyes
Beastliness
Vivisection or animal torture?
Demons and doctors
Scientists and the supernatural
And Dracula for dentists
Sex and death.